Can bookstores survive after Borders?

July 24, 2011 | 8:15 pm

If Borders couldn’t make it, can any bookstore survive? To bookstore owners and patrons watching Borders go down the drain, this has to be a fairly pressing worry. To try to quell the panic, the American Booksellers Association has issued a statement calling the closure “an unfortunate right-sizing of a bookstore landscape that has suffered from overexpansion in certain markets” and insisting that the future for other bricks-and-mortar booksellers is still bright.

In that light, Jason Boog at Galleycat has collected a list of suggestions for independent bookstores on how try to stay relevant to consumers in an e-book era. They include the predictable one such as holding community discussions, or teaming up with other bookstores for media campaigns, but also some more technology-related ones, pertaining to showing customers how they can buy e-books through those particular bookstores.

Can bookstores stay relevant to customers, even with these suggestions? We may have to wait a few years to find out.